Brown and pink and chrome, smelling of crude oil and silicon, the aughts is a decade dotted with devastating hurricanes, technological advancement, and singular instances of institutional betrayal. If tapestries typically chronicle or commemorate history, what would a tapestry about the aughts look like? What needs reviewing? What do I remember? What left an impression? These are questions I ask myself as I dress and re-dress my loom.

I make tapestries out of plastic fibers and pony beads, hair accessories which adorn the end of Black braided styles. The pony bead is a cultural signifier of attention and care for those in the African diaspora. When arranged in tapestries, the beads act as pixels chronicling a femme Black gaze focused on its own interior. I am driven to recontextualize a decade I lived through.

I reflect on both the mundane and the sensational, from video games to historical precedents. My works function as charms on the same bracelet, or hair decorations for one giant girl. Represented in multicolored, pearlized, and glittery plastic units, my works piece together fragments of an era. My choice of material indicates which generation I belong to. Plastic is a material that persists. It is hard to degrade, and it is derived from old deposits of organic matter transformed under acute and unique pressure. Plastic beads are successors to wood, bone, or shell predecessors. Due to the conditions of an accelerating technological landscape which extracts from people and planet, plastic cuteness can supersede natural beauty as an aesthetic strategy. I wish to explore that phenomenon. How fantastic can plastic get?